Can An Algorithm Be a Defective Product?
(Read Time: 3 Minutes)
By Ollie Coull
Imagine a teenager who becomes so deeply addicted to an app that they scroll for hours into the early morning, eventually developing severe clinical depression and a debilitating eating disorder. For over two decades, social media giants completely waved away legal responsibility for these tragedies, hiding behind statutory shields that painted them as mere passive bulletin boards. But a massive legal shift has cracked open a brand-new loophole: suing the algorithm itself as a defective consumer product. Instead of blaming the internet for bad content, plaintiffs are now looking judges in the eye and arguing that features like infinite scroll and push notifications are engineered hazards. It sounds like a radical legal stretch, but courts are officially treating big tech apps exactly like malfunctioning car brakes or toxic children's toys.
To understand how a line of code can face a product liability lawsuit, you have to look at the historical shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US. This law states that internet platforms cannot be treated as the publisher of information provided by someone else. If a user posts something harmful, you sue the user, not the app. However, creative tort lawyers have successfully bypassed this defense by shifting the entire legal theory from content to design. The argument is simple: the issue isn't the text or videos being viewed; it is the addictive, psychological hooks built into the app's framework—like auto-play and engagement algorithms—that constitute a defectively designed product.
This new tort frontier achieved its most explosive breakthrough in the landmark California case K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., where a jury found Meta and Google liable for the negligent design of their platforms, awarding $6 million to a minor plaintiff. The court firmly rejected the defense that the companies were shielded by internet immunity laws. Instead, the ruling established that when a tech platform uses predictive algorithms to deliberately drive vulnerable adolescents into compulsive feedback loops, it is selling an inherently dangerous, defective product.
This shift completely rewrites the rules of corporate liability. If social media apps are legally categorized as consumer products, tech executives face a strict duty to warn users of the psychological risks of their platforms. Furthermore, this litigation is rapidly expanding beyond social media. App developers, video game corporations, and streaming services that use similar high-engagement mechanics are finding themselves square in the crosshairs of mass tort lawyers. It mirrors the massive corporate liability battles fought against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, using the same playbook: proving that executives knew their products were causing harm, hid the internal data, and kept selling them anyway.
At the end of the day, tort law exists to protect consumers from corporate negligence and dangerous innovation. If a physical toy caused children to stop sleeping and self-harm, it would be recalled off the shelves immediately. By applying classic product liability principles to digital spaces, the courts are finally signaling that software developers cannot hide behind the concept of the internet to escape the real-world consequences of their designs. The digital wild west is closing, and big tech is finally on the hook for the damage its code inflicts.
References (APA 7)
In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, MDL 3047 (N.D. Cal. 2024).
K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., JCCP 5255 (Cal. Super. Ct. 2026).
Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U.S.C. § 230.
